Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday November 30, 2010 @02:14PM
from the phone-gnome dept.

CrtxReavr was one of a small avalanche of readers to let us know about a
press conference NASA scheduled for Thursday at 2pm to discuss an "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." I've heard rumors ranging from "proof of life on Titan" to "first contact," depending on how optimistic/crazy you are.

Methinks you might want to expand your range at the bottom a bit. I suspect it will be something along the lines of "We've discovered evidence that some precursor to life may have been present on this extraterrestrial body--or may not, depending heavily on your interpretation of some very ambiguous data."

There is no black monolith on Mars. There is a small one on the moon and a larger one in orbit of Jupiter, or on one of the moons of Saturn, depending on if you subscribe to the books or the movies. Arthur C. Clarke is my hero.

There is no black monolith on Mars. There is a small one on the moon and a larger one in orbit of Jupiter, or on one of the moons of Saturn, depending on if you subscribe to the books or the movies. Arthur C. Clarke is my hero.

You mean if you subscribe to the first book, or the movies AND the rest of the books in the series.

I remember being really annoyed to find that the vicinity of Jupiter, including Ganymede, was subject to sufficient radiation to guarantee that there never would be a "Farmer in the Sky", at least not there.

Nasa? Seriously? Just get any one of your guys to go any old bar. Leave a moon-rock sample or whatever it is you've found on a table there, someone will find it and post about it on their blog and it'll drive people into hysteria.

None of this "Scheduling announcements" - just deny absolutely everything about what you might actually want to announce and let the geeks build it up.

It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.

Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).

The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.

It probably has to do with the recent discovery of oxygen on saturn's moon Rhea.

Doubtful, for two reasons: (a) that has already been announced, and (b) the oxygen there has a plausible nonbiological origin (energetic particles in Saturn's magnetic field interacting with water ice on the surface).

The smart money says this press announcement will be disappointing to most people. Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.

Extra doubtful that it's about Rhea because Carolyn Porco, the head of the Cassini project, isn't on the list of participants.

Doing a few minutes' worth of work in Google comes to the following information about the listed participants in the press conference:

Since the announcement of the press conference says that the finding will impact the "search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," chances are they've found some potential signature of a metabolic process. Notwithstanding what I said above about Carolyn Porco, Cassini flew within 100 km of Rhea earlier this year (March) to "determine what is coming off Rhea" according to NASA's site on the flyby. The timing (March to December) fits well with the amount of time it takes to do data analysis, write a paper, and have it accepted for publication for something that gets fast-tracked. Science is published on Fridays. Nature is published on Thursdays. It would seem like the paper is going to appear in Nature no matter what the exact announcement is.

Since the announcement of the press conference says that the finding will impact the "search for evidence of extraterrestrial life," chances are they've found some potential signature of a metabolic process.

Hmmm... taking what you said about the lack of the Cassini project lead to heart, and noting a lack of anyone attached to any particular observatory project in that list... Is it possible that the announcement won't actually be about a particular astronomical observation at all?

Could it be that these scientists have discovered a plausible biological reaction which could take place in different extraterrestrial environments that simply gives them something new to look for in the future? That would count as an astrobiological finding, and would certainly impact the search for evidence of life.

Not unlike like the whole Apple/Beatles thing.
What was so disappointing about that?

If you didn't already have better copies of the Beatles music before it was available in the iTunes store, and wanted a few obscure tracks that weren't available on any of the "hits" collections, then maybe that was an exciting announcement.

But, based on the sales figures, it looks like converting your own CDs to MP3 for your music player isn't as easy as I thought it was, as millions of people in the US wanted Beatles music but had been waiting 20+ years for somebody to convert the files for them.

The version on iTunes are MP3s made from the 24-bit, 44KHz remaster from last year. Like every remaster for the past 15 years or so, it has dynamic range compression applied.

This results in several things:

People notice sounds they never heard before, because the quiet parts of the songs are now 3-8dB louder than before. Almost every review comments on being able to hear things they couldn't before. In general, you will never hear anything "new" in a remaster that uses the same master tapes (as this one did) that you couldn't have heard before by turning up the volume.

The relative loudness of songs on the same album is messed up. For example, on Sgt. Pepper, "Fixing a Hole" now has peaks about 3-4dB louder than before, while other songs have peaks where they have always been. This is because of the "Loudness War" mentioned in another post. Despite the fact that it's supposed to be a quiet song, quiet songs are now "bad". "Blackbird" from the White Album suffers a similar fate.

Sounds that are supposed to be "big" just don't feel that way. For example, the hammer "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" doesn't stand out as much...it doesn't have as much impact, because it's not as much louder than the rest of the song as it should be. The classic example for this is Phil Collins "In the Air Tonight". Compressed on radio or the latest CD releases, the drum solo has very little impact.

NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.

For the "future of life" bit, could be something cool relating to our ability to live in space. After all, our current body of evidence suggests that we're the future of extraterrestrial life (speculation about Thursday notwithstanding).

Which will, of course, be picked up be the media as "NASA finds extraterrestrials!" instead of the more accurate "NASA finds preliminary evidence of microbial life." And then stupid people will feel betrayed when it's explained to them that, no, this does not mean little grey men with probes.

It might be news from the O/OREOS satellite launched a few days ago. according to wiki it's supposed to rehydrate/feed a bunch of extremophiles on board a "few days" after launch. Given the time for bacterial growth cycles they could quite likely have news already fromt his one, which would probably either be "bacteria revived in microgravity thrives perfectly well in!" or "bacteria revived in microgravity catch fire and die"

Or it might be a very lame announcement like: "we have discovered a new way to SEARCH for life using blahblahmetry, so we're going to start using this new techniques in our next probes"
This is very close to: "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence...."

Or... is something amazing we're about find out within the recent Wikileak

It says that the finding will impact "the search for evidence", which makes me think even you are being a bit optimistic. My bet is on "we have developed a technique that could be used to find evidence that some precursor to life may have been present on a given extraterrestrial body -- or may not, depending heavily on your interpretation of the very ambiguous data this technique will provide."

I only deal with meta-chicken. Not a metaphor, but instead, meta-fried.

Once, there was a murder of crows who were harassing some horses in the paddock near my barn. I yelled at them, told them that corral-ation wasn't caws-ation, but apparently they thought I was simply winging it.

Also:

Linux is forking good
And Windows is forking not.

I'm speaking of course
Of a call in the source
Just one of them has got

Or maybe they want to talk about a discovery confirming the suitability of possible targets [technologyreview.com] for life or colonization? I'm guessing it's something along those lines... or perhaps they have a target that they think they can deploy bacteria to that will provide a better atmosphere for possible habitation in the distant future?

Think about it though. Would NASA announce contact or, you know, the president? I'm guessing that the politicians would be all over this claiming credit if it was something that

I am totally jaded. When I see something like this I read it as "NASA calls press conference to remind government and people they are still here and need money, because what they do is really, really cool". Of course, I agree too, but I would be surprised if there was really any kind of life found. Prove me wrong NASA! I, for one, would welcome our new alien-insect overlords!

NASA Administrator: We're putting a man on Mars!Reporter: When?NASA Administrator: 2055!Reporter: Long after your administration is gone and no longer around to be held accountable for any long-forgotten promises?NASA Administrator Yep!Reporter: What if 2055 comes along and we're no closer then to Mars than now?NASA Administrator: Well, you'll have to ask the NASA administrator about it then.Reporter: What if you're still alive and we ask you?NASA Administrator: I'll blame him.Reporter: Do you have anything

Oh yeah, because that's one sure fire way of getting along with the stellar neighbours. Send them some "free" music today then, in a few weeks time, the RIAA sends in the lawyers and all their base belong to us...

Probably Beatles music has been beamed in the direction of Alpha Centuri.

Not going to happen. Perhaps the biggest copyright wtf in the history of humanity: "Astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan had wanted [Here Comes The Sun] to be included on the Voyager Golden Record, copies of which were attached to both spacecraft of the Voyager program to provide any entity that recovered them a representative sample of human civilization. Although The Beatles favoured the idea, EMI refused to release the rights and when the probes were launched in 1977 the song was not included."

More or less... I read "astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life" as exactly that with the implied addition of "we found a promising target for a future mission! So we'll be needing to keep our jobs and get some more funding, tenkyuvedymuch."

Some word out on the web, including NASA funded astrobiology teams (there are fourteen), seem to indicate the possibility of them finding something strange here on Mother Earth, probably something in or around Mono Lake according to some people and its arsenic based life forms [astrobio.net]. Since the major announcement last June by NASA concerning 'Titan and the Case of the Missing Hydrogen' [redorbit.com].
In fact one of the ladies on the panel this Thursday is in fact the researcher who is studying possible arsenic based life forms in Mono Lake. I'd say that she found something. One thing for certain, with the embargo we won't know for sure until Thursday.:)

I think we have a winner here. The article you linked mentions that she expects to see results over the next several months and was written slightly more than a year ago. That gives enough time to get results, tweak the experiment, analyze the results, even completely re-run the experiment if you think the results are ground breaking enough. The time span seems right, the other speakers are in related fields, it has direct influence on astrobiology. Specifically, it makes Titan a very interesting place

One of the individuals in the scheduled press announcement has a website [ironlisa.com] and based on her work [ironlisa.com] my bet is that they may have found some indications that there is life on earth that uses arsenic instead of phosphorus.